A limited constitutional government calls for a rules-based, freemarket monetary system, not the topsy-turvy fiat dollar that now exists under central banking. This issue of the Cato Journal examines the case for alternatives to central banking and the reforms needed to move toward free-market money.

The more widespread use of body cameras will make it easier for the American public to better understand how police officers do their jobs and under what circumstances they feel that it is necessary to resort to deadly force.

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Tag: mainstream media

The New Republic has an interesting article explaining “How Campaign Finance Laws Made the British Press so Powerful.” Basically, only British newspapers are free of regulations that suppress political speech. The author suggests adding more controls (including content restrictions) on the British newspapers to enforce “impartial” coverage. In other words, the media should be just as repressed as everyone else, and political leaders should be free of criticism.

Like many others, I have long thought that U.S. newspapers editorialize in favor of campaign finance restrictions to control competing speech and thereby become more powerful. After Citizens United, other organizations now enjoy the same First Amendment protections as media corporations like The New York Times and The Washington Post. No doubt that does mean such corporations are less powerful than they would be if campaign finance laws suppressed political speech that competes with their editorials and news reports. However, such competition is good for voters.

Is Joe Miller’s win in Alaska a sign of the tea party’s potency as a national political force?

My response:

Joe Miller’s win in Alaska isn’t simply a sign, but one more in a long string of signs of the Tea Party’s potency as a national political force. From Virginia, New Jersey, and Massachusetts to the massive Beck rally on the National Mall on Saturday, forces are stirring in the nation as they haven’t for years. And as that rally showed, they aren’t entirely or even mainly political forces. Nor are they mainly religious in any narrow sense, as the mainstream media seem to be saying, once again missing the point.

Rather, the Tea Party movement, like the original Tea Party over two centuries ago, is a rebellion against overweening government and a call for the restoration of individual liberty, individual responsibility, and limited constitutional government. That there should be a religious element in this should not surprise. After all, America’s three great revolutions – the first whereby we declared ourselves free and independent, the second that ended slavery, and the third that ended legal segregation – were all supported and inspired by religious beliefs and institutions.

And for good reason: In America, at least, religion is a private affair, free from government coercion, a domain where individuals can and must assume responsibility for themselves – the very virtue that is crippled by dependence on government. Alaskans and Americans more broadly are increasingly rejecting the Murkowski view that government is instituted to provide goods and services. It’s instituted to ensure our freedom, including freedom from forced dependence on government.

As a former conservative (and a former leftist; I got around), I have noticed that the mainstream media often use the term “ultra-conservative” but rarely apply any equivalent term to extremists on the Left. (I use Left/leftist because I mean to reclaim the term “liberal” for libertarians.) Evidently, there are no left-wing extremists, only right-wing extremists.

But maybe President Obama’s press secretary Robert Gibbs gave the mainstream media a term they can use: “the professional left.” Venting about these left-wing extremists in his own party, Gibbs said:

They will be satisfied when we have Canadian health care and we’ve eliminated the Pentagon.

President Obama has repeatedly stated his preference for a single-payer health care system, such as they have in Canada. Does that make him a semi-professional leftist?

And for those other publications in the MSM still standing at the edge of the pool: the water’s warm folks, c’mon in.

What’s really interesting, though, is that the HHS had the moral fibre to actually issue a press release about this damning study. That showed courage – and a certain panache. I particularly liked this, from HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius: “Research clearly shows that Head Start positively impacts the school readiness of low-income children.”

Umm, yes Ms. Secretary, but the same research shows those effects vanish by the end of first grade. I guess that information is on a need-to-not-know basis. The public needs to not know about it or the administration hasn’t got a snowball’s chance in Kauai of getting American tax payers to throw another $100 billion or so at government pre-K, as President Obama is so very keen to do.

Update:

In my original review of the coverage on this story I missed the blog that first broke the story: Early Ed Watch at the New America Foundation. One thing that distinguishes New America’s supporters of big government pre-k programs from those in the Obama administration is that the former have a good grasp of the implications of this study, writing that: “The next few weeks are probably going to be rocky ones for the Head Start community. Results released today from the Impact Study show that children’s gains from participating in Head Start, documented in a 2005 installment of the study, do not last through the end of 1st grade.”

But if the folks at the NAF recognize this reality, that begs an important question: will they now redirect their efforts to the support of programs whose benefits for disadvantaged children actually grow in magnitude the longer kids stay in school, or will they continue to push for programs like Head Start that have been proven costly failures?

In a post at the Enterprise Blog two days ago, economist Mark Perry deftly parodies a typical mainstream media account of trade protectionism by editing the story in redline to contrast its original presentation with its true significance. I recommend reading the whole thing, but here’s the first paragraph:

WASHINGTON POST (Reuters) - A U.S. trade panel gave final approval on Wednesday to dutiestaxes ranging from 10 to 16 percent on cost-conscious firms in the U.S. who purchase low-priced Chinese-made steel pipe rather than high-price domestic pipe, in the biggest U.S. trade case to date against China American companies (and their shareholders, employees, and customers) who shop globally for their inputs and find the best value in China.

Perry’s point—and I share his frustration—is that the mainstream media typically fail to convey even a sense of the costs of U.S. protectionism to U.S. interests even though Americans (and non-Americans living in the U.S.) bear the greatest burden of that protectionism. When the U.S. government imposes duties on Chinese steel, it is imposing taxes on U.S. consuming industries, their employees, their shareholders, and their customers.

Considering that more than half of the value of all U.S. imports in a typical year is raw materials and intermediate goods (i.e., inputs for producers operating in the United States, who employ people, transact with other businesses, and pay taxes in the United States), the number of U.S. victims of U.S. import taxes is much larger than one can ever glean from a typical media account. Taxes on Chinese-made ”Oil Country Tubular Goods” or OCTG (the subject in the article Perry edits), which are used for oil exploration and transport, will raise costs in the energy industry, which are likely to be passed onto consumers in the form of higher energy prices.

As described in this paper, trade is no longer a competition between “Us and Them.” There is competition between entities that—because of the proliferation of cross-border investment and transnational production and supply chains—often defy any meaningful national identification. But that competition is preceded by collaboration and cooperation between entities in different countries. The factory floor has broken through its walls and now spans borders and oceans—a fact that renders U.S. workers and workers in other countries complementary in more and more cases, and a fact that amplifies the cost of trade barriers.

But media—chained to the false “Us versus Them” paradigm—describe protectionist policies as actions taken by one national monolith against another, and convey the impression that American readers should be cheering for Team America. It is a worldview that conflates the well-being of “our producers” with some homogenized conception of “the national interest.” It is the same misguided scoreboard mentality that colors reporting of the trade account, where exports are deemed “good” and imports “bad.” And, it is this simplistic, misleading characterization that, in my opinion, is most responsible for withering public opinion about trade and globalization over the past decade.

Is Tea Party conservatism a help or a hazard for Republicans seeking a return to power?

My response:

Let’s start with some clarity: “Tea Party conservatism” stands for several things, but it is not the caricature one often finds in the mainstream media, to say nothing of the left wing blogs. It is a movement with deep historical roots, drawing its name and inspiration from the Boston Tea Party of 1773. As with that event, taxes brought it to the fore – on Tax Day, April 15. But taxes are simply the most obvious manifestation of modern government run amok, insinuating itself into every corner of life. Trillions of dollars of debt for our children, out-of-control government budgets, massive interventions in private affairs – the list of wrongs is endless, and under Obama has exploded. He stands for nothing if not for making us all dependent on the government he has promised us. That’s not America. That’s a foreign vision, which over the centuries countless millions have fled, searching for freedom.

To be sure, the Tea Party movement has its fringe elements, as did the revolt against British tyranny, which the establishment of its day disparaged. So too does the Obama administration, some of whom have already resigned. The basic question, however, is what does the movement stand for? What are its principles? And on that, the contrast with the Obama vision is stark: However much confusion there might be on specific issues, which is to be expected, the broad principles are clear. The Tea Party movement stands for limited constitutional government. At its rallies, on hand-written sign after sign, that was the message repeatedly seen. These are ordinary Americans – Republicans, Independents, and even Democrats – who want simply to be left alone to plan and live their own lives. They don’t want “community organizers” to help empower them to get more from government.

But they do need to be organized to bring that about – to get government off their backs. And the Republican Party should be the natural vehicle toward that end – the party, after all, that was formed to get government off the backs of several million slaves. But today’s Republican Party is a mixed lot: Some understand those principles; but others, as in the NY 23 race, are all but indistinguishable from their counterparts in the party of Obama. The problem in NY 23 was not that a third party entered the race. Rather, the party establishment botched things from the beginning, by picking a nominee who properly belonged in the Democratic Party, as her pathetic last-minute endorsement indicated, and that’s why a third party entered the race – with a novice of a nominee who nearly won despite the odds against him.

The question, therefore, is not whetherTea Party conservatism is a help or a hazard for Republicans seeking a return to power? To the contrary, it is whether the Republican Party is a help or a hindrance to the Tea Party movement? It will be a help only if it returns to its roots. The mainstream media, overwhelmingly of the Democratic persuasion, will continue to push Republicans to be “moderate,” of course – meaning “Democrat Lite” – to which the proper response is: Why would voters go for that when they can get the real thing on the Democratic line? If Tuesday’s returns showed anything, it is that Independents, a truly mixed lot, are up for grabs; but at the same time, they are looking for leaders who promise not simply to “solve problems” but to do so in a way that respects our traditions of individual liberty, free markets, and limited government. When Republican candidates stand clearly and firmly for those principles, they stand a far better chance of being elected than when they temporize. That is the lesson that Republicans must grasp – and not forget – if they are to return to power.

Is Fox News a “legitimate news organization?” As compared to what? The New York Times? NPR? MSNBC? Please.

The Obama team, Democrats like my good friend Walter Dellinger, and the so-called Mainstream Media (MSM) howl about Fox News for two main reasons. First, Fox is covering news the MSM ignores because it doesn’t “fit.” And second, in part because of that, the Fox audience continues to grow while the MSM audience is shrinking, raising a serious question about whether the MSM is any longer “mainstream.”

Let’s not pretend that the MSM doesn’t “manage” the news. It does it mainly by deciding daily what is and is not “news” and then by deciding how to report that news. Do we need any better example than the current ACORN story? As Fox was bringing the facts to light, nowhere were those facts to be found in the MSM – until they could be ignored no longer. Or take the huge 9/12 anti-big-government rally here in Washington. Fox covered it for the event that it was. Where was it covered in The New York Times? On page A37. And more revealing still, in the NYT electronic edition, the second of three stories posted under “Politics” was headlined “Thousands Rally in Minnesota Behind Obama’s Call for Health Care Overhaul,” the third was headlined “Thousands Rally in Capital to Protest Big Government” – the implication being that the two rallies were equivalent in size when in fact the protest rally dwarfed the Obama rally by many multiples.

But why pretend it’s otherwise? The president himself admits the MSM bias. Speaking at the May 9 White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner, “I am Barack Obama. Most of you covered me. All of you voted for me. (Laughter and applause.) Apologies to the Fox table.” A good laugh line in that setting, to be sure, but only because he’s said at last what we all know to be true.

Walter Dellinger may write, citing no evidence, that the Tax Day Tea Party protests were “conceived and executed by Fox News,” but he surely knows that’s not true. He hails from North Carolina, albeit now from Duke. He knows that outside that cloister there’s protest in the land. Fox News isn’t generating that opposition to the Obama juggernaut. It’s real, but it’s so much easier for the MSM to blame the bearer of that news than to face the reasons for their own falling numbers: Their “news” doesn’t fit with what so many people see with their own eyes. I’m reminded of the great Groucho Marx line: “Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?”